Climate Change Is Killing Alpine Skiing as We Know It

"Generation to Generation, the natural world decays, the ratchet of perception tightens. Gradually, imperceptibly, big sharks give way to small sharks, small sharks to baitfish, baitfish to jellyfish to slime (algae and cyanobacteria). On land, the big cats and wolves becomes feral cats and coyotes. The wild standard sinks ever lower and becomes ever heavier to raise. Few notice, few care. Eventually nobody remembers that wolves not long ago freely roamed the Adirondacks, and hence there is mad howling over the suggestion of returning them to their homeland. Southern Californians panic on learning that a cougar track has been discovered on the fringes of their neighborhood- mindless that cougars roamed these hills and canyons long before gated communities drew their lines in the chaparral. 'Shifting baselines' help explain why the Pennsylvania deer hunter sees everything right and nothing wrong in a forest that's swarming with deer yet as barren of biodiversity as a city park."

~ William Stolzenburg, Where the Wild Things Were

I think the culprit in this case was overfishing, but the term was general enough to apply to any change like this. Maybe someone reading this knows the term.

Certainly in the long term, the climate will change. We harnessed the natural world and brought it on ourselves sooner. I think we should do what we can, but the apocalyptic language of "planet on fire", etc, and all of us pretending that our little snapshot of the climate is all there ever was and we should never expect to adapt to anything else seems utterly foolish and more big-headed than I can put into words.

As someone who believes in climate change, and grew up playing in the snow - what on earth are you talking about? Where is this magical place where it used to be snowy all winter long and is now averaging 50-60 degrees with snow now being a rare occasion?

Exaggerating to the extent you are does nothing but hurt the message because it's blatantly and obviously false and when climate deniers read people making claims like you are, the entire discussion loses all credibility.

Maybe the consumers...you have to keep in mind the competing interests of capitalism. I could see SV and SV VCs falling all over themselves with such a "market opportunity."

>And so long as someone has financial motivations to push the idea that this is normal, people will keep thinking it is and they'll forget just how much things changed.

This! I could see VCs start investing in numerous companies hawking all kinds of caffeine pills and supplements, spending billions on marketing, such that consumers would stop talking about the nostalgia of coffee, rather begin asking how we ever lived without X startup that has disrupted the industry and optimized "human energy."

"MacKinnon illustrates this phenomenon, known in psychology as “change blindness,” with an anecdote about fish photographs from the Florida Keys. Old photographs from the 1940s show delighted fishermen displaying their prize catches—marlins as long as a man is tall. When present-day fishermen see those pictures, they flat-out refuse to believe they are authentic.

Human beings tend to be blind to gradual changes in their environment, assuming that the way things are right now is how they always have been and always will be. We do not miss the former beauty of the world, he would say, because we have never known it.

I am not so sure that we don’t miss it. I think we do miss it, but we don’t know what it is we are missing. We feel a void, a sense of poverty, a hunger for something unidentifiable. Transferred onto money or consumer items, that hunger drives continued cycles of destruction. Transferred onto drugs, gambling, alcohol, it drives the unsolvable social problem of addiction. Perhaps the degradation of nature is not without its consequences after all."

Americans are experiencing less snow because they are migrating to warmer areas. [2]

[1] http://www.theworldcounts.com/stories/Temperature-Change-Ove...

[2] https://www.curbed.com/2017/3/27/15077042/sunbelt-snowbelt-m...

Which pretty much nails the problem. Us older folks remember that cold, snowy winters were normal, that there were orders of magnitude more insects such that frequent stops to clear windscreen, headlights or helmet visor were just normal. We remember mixed farms that husbanded the land rather than beat it into submission.

Those kid's normal is no insects, no snow, monoculture industrial farmland everywhere, signs of human interference in every remote corner of the globe. Most live in concreted cities where food comes from the shop, not the land. Everything is based on that "normality of childhood". They quite literally don't see the problem. Even seeing old photos and film footage doesn't convey... I wish I'd listened to more of my granddad's tales of shire horses and traction engines. I wish I could have seen through his eyes.

The environment and natural world has become a theme park to visit for a skiing holiday, safari or to farm to oblivion. To watch in the latest Attenborough. Only a few outdoorsy types understand it, even fewer what it used to be any more.

Most of us have no connection with the natural world. Every industry and activity has become unsustainable by injecting rampant consumerism and near limitless fossil fuel into the process. Ironic so many of us are starting to actually care about impact, as it reaches worst ever.

I really do think OP has it right saying we need the "appearance of immediate, severe-yet-not-deadly impacts on our day-to-day lives" before anything truly significant will happen.

I fondly remember playing in the snow in Siberia and above north circle in northern parts of Russia during my childhood. Now in California, I am truly expecting >50F January (and I mostly get it).

They aren’t hedging their bets by learning how to work and create things. This will come back to bite them.

But in the mean time, let’s keep snow skiing in the mall with all this foreign money.

Mentally said goodbye to day trips, I'm simply living too far from the Alps now it seems. Going back to my youth in 80s and 90s, I remember skiing from late November all the way to, say, March. At resorts that closed over a decade ago due to a lack of snow.

And the flip side of that is that per-day lift ticket prices are very high, to milk the casual skier and the luxury-seeking 1%ers who can afford to spent $250 (lift ticket+ rentals+snacks) on a single day at Stowe or Vail or Whistler.

At this point you basically have to either buy one of the mega passes, or seek out the smaller family owned resorts that still charge reasonable prices.

Look into the Indy Pass, it's an affordable pass that gets you 2 days at a bunch independent smaller ski areas.

Also a season’s pass at Ragged is $249 too, which is an insane deal. There are still smaller mountains in New England that aren’t trying to be mega-resorts where prices are good.

Unfortunately it's what the market will bear. Of course college kids can't out-compete the hordes of DINKs from the Boston area who decide last minute that this will be a good skiing weekend.

As other commenters have mentioned there are still reasonable prices to be had but you have to go find them. The days of just showing up on a whim and getting a fair price are over (this applies to a lot of things, not just skiing).

>the messaging here is that you have to be wealthy to be able to ski.

It's recreational activity you have to travel to and requires a lot of gear and a somewhat prepared area to do it. That sets a pretty high wealth floor no matter what.

You might be right that prices not related to climate change will kill the industry but if that doesn't happen climate change will increase prices (a mountain that's open for fewer months has to charge more to cover fixed costs) until the same effect is achieved.

Of course if I were flying in for a 4 day trip once a year vs living near the resorts, I’d be singing a different story.

Every week you would hear "it's too expensive, what about the youths?!"

Every week you'd also hear "overcrowding is killing alpine skiing, why are the lines so long, why do we allow so many people?!"

I've never related too much with the people who, upon witnessing the high season hordes as the park operates at 100% capacity, conclude "yes, it's cheaper entry that will fix our problems."

$35 to have us both access 25+ trails within 2 hour drive, or pay $250 per person for a season pass at the local ski mountain.

Wasn't a tough decision, and I was surprised how many hills there are in XC ski. I thought I would be bored switching over but I really am not!

Location: Upper Peninsula of Michigan

Given what’s happening to the ski seasons in the Alps, I’m not sure if teaching a kid how to ski today is kindness or cruelty. I’m pretty sure there will still be some decent skiing until I’m ready to hang up my boots (I’m about 40), but my 10 year old niece? Her kids?

Is this really common?

I'm aware there's climate change denial, but amongst those not wilfully ignorant, I would've presumed the fact that we're now working to slow the rate of change is a well-accepted best-case.

> What we have emitted so far is in the air and it's too late.

Why? There could be carbon capture technologies implemented, massive reforestation efforts organized.

[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/07/how-t...

[2] https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/01/16/microsoft-will-b...

If anything, ski touring is often more expensive (gear wise, might save on the ski pass if not starting from the top of a lift). It also has a bigger dependency on snow quality if one want a fun ski experience and isn't mainly in it for the touring part.

Its simply a different sport. It can be done in similar place, but I prefer proper wilderness whenever possible. And yes, risk of dying in avalanche is non-0 in most places.

I used to think that too, but recently I'm softening to the argument that a given number of vacationers on even the nastiest bulldozed runs has much less regional impact than if the same number of users would go touring instead, everyone spreading out to seek their own patch of untouched nature.

Of course in terms of global impact (energy use per person) touring is nonetheless much better.

I do alpine skiing every year but I have no illusion that the tourism severely hurts the environment, although there are a lot of other detrimental factors besides CO2 output.

I mostly ski in regions where your place lies around 2000m and snow is guaranteed. But even this far up you see more and more snow cannons deployed. They also create huge reservoirs with artificial snow to extend the skiing season. Huge waste of energy and skiing on artificial snow is awful, but it probably is financially viable.

It was huge concern in the 1970s and 1980s. Now population growth is expected to be flat by the end of the 21st century.

It's fallen so much that that it's creating problems in some areas.

Luckily tech I outpacing fossil fuels and beating them on price.

Germany is switching off the coal plants and replacing them with natural gas which releases only 50% CO2 than coal.

The nuclear plants will be switched off without replacement at all. The over all energy budget will be reduced due to better energy efficiency.

See also the thread from today:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22062968

Germany looks to step up coal exit timetable (afp.com)

Yeah using snow cannons to keep climate change affected ski resorts open is borderline genius. /s

Cheap flights also mean that people don't bother with their local ski areas in the midwest -- they fly west for luxury vacations instead.

It does seem though that skiing might be having a fairly recent resurgence.

Though, if or when golf starts getting hit by climate change, that will really move the needle.

Wish there was a way to filter out ridiculousness from the feed.

(Though admittedly "just" convert to summer activities sounds much easier than it is. Skiing was something that was always confined to few areas, you can hike just as well in many more places.)

While I would love to see more bike parks, I think most mountain resorts would shutter if these were the only activities bringing in revenue throughout the year.

Somewhat paradoxically, climate change could make some areas of the Rockies and Sierras more snowy. But depletion of snow in other areas would cause the areas with snow to become even more expensive -- and they're already pretty exclusive today.

However, a fairly bitter pill to swallow this year was some parks I was looking forward to riding being caught in the Australian bushfires. One was a local park, and I look forward to helping rebuild it once it's safe.

It's a scary prospect for that to become the norm. Nature is dear to me. Being able to go riding in the forest is a pillar of my health, mental and physical. I have consistently been unable to ride this summer due to heatwaves and bushfire smoke. Occasionally I would make poor judgement, and leave to ride when it was clear only to be smoked out on the trails an hour later, from fires hundreds of kilometers away.

Skiing is simply more unique/exquisite experience, more people are willing to spend more. It also often requires less effort, if one is not so fit. Plenty of folks ride down 2 times in the morning, park with beer/wine on the sun, eat, do 1-2 runs and call it a day and go to apres bar. For whole week.

I am a bit skeptical about this 'reinventing' of ski resorts into something new. I look at Chamonix in France, for somebody like me the best mountain place in Europe, maybe even globally. Beautiful hiking, trail running, climbing, world class (or easy) alpinism available quickly, skiing, ski touring, paraglide, bikes and so on and on. The best season for non-winter activities is actually early autumn, September-October - better temperatures than summer, nature is stunningly beautiful, good stable weather.

But almost nobody comes in autumn. Why? Because kids don't have holidays and are back to school. This is the bulk of visitors in mountains, anytime. So summer season for tourism lasts 2-2.5 months. Winter one, still is more like 4 months.

Put those fires in the US and the national conversation will certainly shift...

I fondly remember the old (apocryphal) story about how you can pop frogs in a pot of water, and if you increase the heat slowly enough, they'll stay in it until they boil to death. "Silly frogs" we all thought. Yet, here we are.

You bet. Also because civil war in Syria has nothing to do with climate change and all to do with politics. But people are too busy worrying about the future to care about the present.

I only worry once summer is over, they'll forget, and when it really matters we'll be complacent again and elect the wrong people.

As an aside, I'm not 100% sure this isn't already happening with Tim Horton's.

Which by the way are already happening; all over the world, governments are slowly adjusting emission rights, energy companies are transitioning to renewables and closing coal plants, car companies are required to only sell low emissions cars, and billions of trees are being planted all over the world.

It's already happening at a huge scale but all you're thinking of is small changes that you yourself could reasonably do that, in the end, have a negligible impact on a global challenge.

Humanity isn't yet advanced enough socially and in collective maturity to take the necessary actions to stop climate change.

We're still part animal, part sentient, and we don't know where that line lies, much less control which side we're on all the time.

All we can do is understand what the impact of climate change will be and plan to survive if we can find a way to do so.

Within the next century we are definitely going to have:

* Massive numbers of displaced people due to rising seas, excessive heat, lack of water, lack of food. The bulk of these people will die.

* Existing countries that do not or can not take steps necessary to safeguard their population sufficiently to maintain their economy, military strength, and the logistics that support it are going to undergo major changes, possibly including dissolution or massive shrinking of borders.

* The wealthy of the world will not lack anything, be it food, water, housing, cooling, military protection, etc. The weakening of governments across the world will allow these people more power and freedom than ever before. We may enter a new age of kings by other titles.

The world at the end of the next century is going to be vastly different from the present world. Humanity will survive, but that's setting the bar low. Many humans will die, many ideals will die, and we may not learn anything from all of it. In other words, humanity will be the same as it's been through all of recorded history.

Coffee would work the same way. We already have different strata of coffee. If supply tightens up, 80% of the market would turn into ersatz coffee with added caffeine, and whatever still was being produces would become a bigger luxury item.

And it's not looking good.

Some of that may be that the local hills have gotten incrementally worse because of reduced snow (or at least more bad snow years). But it also feels as if downhill skiing has become more of a destination activity. (And many of the big areas have also invested heavily in real estate.)